In conversation with ETtech, Peter Gartenberg,General Manager, Enterprise and Partner Group, Microsoft India talks about their cloud strategy in India, their play in the manufacturing sector, cloud security among others.ET Bureau | December 08, 2016, 09:56 IST

In conversation with ETtech, Peter Gartenberg,General Manager, Enterprise and Partner Group, Microsoft India talks about their cloud strategy in India, their play in the manufacturing sector, cloud security among others.

Is Microsoft testing the waters by bringing the local datacenters to India? And who owns the datacenters?

India is an important market for us and to support our customers’ digital transformation, cloud services offered through local datacenters will be pivotal to our continued growth. We announced the availability of our commercial cloud services from three local data centers in India at the end of September 2015. These three datacenters are located in Chennai (South India region), Pune (Central India region) and Mumbai (West India region).

We have invested more than $15 billion in building a resilient cloud infrastructure. Our global cloud infrastructure currently includes more than 100 datacenters located in over 40 countries and we are rapidly building capacity to serve our customers worldwide.

Today, we operate more than 100 datacenters including both owned and leased facilities.

What are the various types of cloud which Microsoft offers, and what is the difference?

Microsoft offers hyper-scale public cloud as well as hybrid cloud solutions which provide high-end security and computing services around big data analytics, intelligence and the Internet of Things (IoT) – a key differentiator for us in the market.

When Microsoft says Security, how do you ensure that customer’s data remains secure?

Microsoft adopts a three-pronged approach to enable a secured IT environment for businesses

• Protect all endpoints – from sensors and datacenters to identities and SaaS applications• Move faster to Detect threats using the scale and intelligence of the cloud, machine learning and behavioral monitoring• Respond more quickly and comprehensively.

There are three, key important differentiators in Microsoft’s security approach: Platform, Intelligence and Partners.

• Under Platform, Microsoft secures our own technology as well as third parties, whether through identity, device, apps & data or infrastructure. This is done by security teams across Microsoft, Windows, Microsoft Azure and Office365. No other cloud provider offers the breadth of trust features that Microsoft does across cloud platforms.

• Under Intelligence, Microsoft has an intelligent security graph which takes information from across all our services and products, and brings them together to be able to be proactive around security. This allows us to monitor for user authentications and updated devices, and check for spam and malware.

• Under Partners, Microsoft understands this is a broad ecosystem in which we need to work with everyone. We partner with peers, industry, industry associations, government bodies and others in the ecosystem.

Who are adopting the cloud at the highest rate? SMBs, start-ups or big enterprises?

In the first six months of our launching our local cloud services, 52 of the top 100 companies on BSE have embraced Microsoft cloud.

Here are some examples.

o Luminous Power Technologies in association with iBoT Control Systems has launched its next generation Connected Solar Inverter, powered by iBoT’s iQu Internet of Things (IoT) platform. This is built on Microsoft Azure Hyperscale cloud platform.

o One of India’s largest AlcoBev manufacturers was facing the issue of stolen / misplaced Visicoolers (display refrigerators) which was not only leading to reduced availability of chilled beer to customers, but also brand visibility for the company. An integrated hardware (iBoT Connected Processor) + Software (Azure IoT Hub/Storage/App Services) mechanism helped keep track of the Visicoolers leading to increased profitability, prevention of theft and enhanced consumer experience.

• Government: The Andhra Pradesh government uses Azure Machine learning to predict which students will struggle/drop out of school across its 10,000 schools. Earlier in the year we signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Punjab government to provide our cloud computing infrastructure for providing better facilities in education, agriculture and healthcare. We signed a similar MoU with the Government of Telangana, in November 2016.

What part of Cloud computing technology has been adopted by the manufacturing industry overall?

Microsoft is driving digital transformation of the manufacturing sector at every stage, starting with Azure IoT Suite available through the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, to the rich insights possible through the Cortana Intelligence Suite, to presenting information in new, natural ways. Microsoft solutions enables

• Hybrid Approach - While providers are focused only on Public Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Microsoft has strong focus on, both, on-premise private cloud solutions as well as Public cloud platform (Azure). This allows customers the choice and flexibility of selecting the right cloud for their applications.

• Intelligent Platform Services – Microsoft has been the leader in Intelligent Platform as a Service (PaaS) service like analytics, machine learning, media services, etc. which makes it easy for our customers to move seamlessly from IaaS to advanced high value platform services on the cloud. In a world where agility is an important competitive factor for most companies, this enhances the value that they can derive out of the cloud.

• Trusted Cloud – As enterprises move their applications to cloud, they are looking for cloud services providing security, transparency and compliance. Microsoft offers the highest compliance levels in the industry including “Government of India MeitY Empanelment”.

Your initiatives with the government of India?

Agriculture: Microsoft has collaborated with ICRISAT (International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics) and the Andhra Pradesh government in creating a Sowing App and Personalized Village Advisory Dashboard to provide powerful cloud-based predictive analytics. The app empowers farmers with crucial information and insights, helping the farmers to determine the most appropriate time to sow seeds. This in turn helps reduce crop failures and achieve optimal harvests.

Education: To boost the Andhra Pradesh’s education ecosystem, Microsoft is working with the Government of Andhra Pradesh on a machine learning based model to analyze student data across its 10,000 schools to predict which students will struggle/drop out. This helps them take preventive action to increase student retention. Officials have created more than 600,000 predictions using Azure Machine Learning, revolutionizing how Indian local governments can increase student retention.

Last Mile Connectivity: Addressing the issue of last mile connectivity, we have piloted last-mile access projects in Srikakulum in Andhra Pradesh and Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh. We have also partnered with the Government of Maharashtra to create the first smart village in Harisal.

Healthcare: L V Prasad Eye Institute is using Azure Machine Learning and Power BI to predict the final surgical outcome of eye surgery patients and provide insights into how blindness spreads across the country, helping health officials develop strategies to fight the issue. Using a predictive model that helps predict regression rates for eye operations, doctors can pinpoint the procedures needed to prevent and treat visual impairments. Using the data, doctors can also better understand the risks involved for a patient, which leads to more effective treatment while reducing costs.

We have also entered into partnerships with the State Governments of Telangana, Punjab and Tamil Nadu to help the Government explore cloud, machine learning and mobile based solutions.

What lacks in terms of infrastructure and governance with respect to datacenters in India?

The government recognizes the transformative power of technology and sees it as an enabler to amplify the change that we all seek in delivering better citizen services. Harnessing the power of innovation to address big societal challenges, requires more than technology itself. It is critical for stakeholders across the ecosystem to come together.

India is seeing massive investment in datacenter and cloud infrastructure recently driven by companies like Microsoft and others. But datacenters are only one aspect of the country’s digital infrastructure. Reliable and ample network connectivity is still not available everywhere and is not available at competitive cost compared to global rates.

It is also equally important to support policy initiatives like open technology standards, intellectual property rights, freedom of expression, and addressing evolving challenges in areas such as data security and privacy. MeitY is a step in the right direction to create a cloud adoption framework.

You recently said, "With the help of the local datacenters, we have been able to address key customer concerns related to public cloud such as security, privacy control, transparency, and compliance." Explain How?

There are two major concerns that enterprises have while adopting cloud – latency for their mission critical applications and data residency. By providing cloud services from local datacenters both these concerns are addressed. We have seen many restricted sectors adopting cloud services in the last one year since we went live from India. Insurance is one example. We have 22 insurance companies using our cloud services. We also have a dominant share of the healthcare industry. Most of the organized healthcare providers – hospitals and pharma companies - are already using our cloud services.

One of the main concerns from potential customers is that Azure only works well for Windows shops. Comment?

You can run operating system, any database, any development framework on any device using Azure. Microsoft Azure is one of the most open platforms in the world. It supports first party workloads (from Microsoft), third party workloads (from IBM, SAP, Oracle), applications from ISVs in Azure Marketplace and a lot of open source products. In fact, a high percentage of virtual machines running on Azure in India run on Linux. Microsoft not only supports open source, but also heavily contributes to open source and uses open source for delivering services on Azure.

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As the Special Chief Secretary & IT Advisor to the Chief Minister - Govt. of Andhra Pradesh, J A Chowdary is all for chasing new growth horizons, pursuing radically different development approaches and outguessing technology trends that will shape the future.

As the Special Chief Secretary & IT Advisor to the Chief Minister - Govt. of Andhra Pradesh, J A Chowdary is all for chasing new growth horizons, pursuing radically different development approaches and outguessing technology trends that will shape the future.